The Perfect Parent is a Myth by Matt Coyne, author, MAN vs. BABY (Book Excerpt)
For most people, I think it’s the point at which you start ignoring advice and opinions and start trusting your instincts that you begin to feel like you are getting the hang of this parenting stuff.
But that doesn’t mean you suddenly have all the answers. Christ, it doesn’t even mean you necessarily understand the questions. You don’t overnight become the “perfect parent.” No one does. Because, despite what you may have heard, there’s no such thing.
Try to conjure an image of the perfect parent in your mind. (This person will most likely be a woman. Expectations of men are way, way lower.) Perhaps it’s a celebrity or a real person, a friend even, whom you see sharing their perfection on Facebook or Instagram. That person, no doubt, seems to glide through parenthood without a hair out of place. They spend their mornings weaving their children’s clothes out of hemp and dandelions, their afternoons making rice pudding out of breast milk. They are never unkempt, never tired, never frustrated, and always fucking baking.
And they are con artists. Look closer. Look into their eyes and you will see the lie. These are the calm swans whose feet are frantically pedaling beneath the surface. For every staged photo of contained messy play and baked organic muffins fresh out of the oven, just out of shot you can be sure that there is a baby screaming the world in two and a toddler forcing a mashed-up cookie into a dog’s ass.
How many of these parentally perfect creatures have you actually seen, up close and in real life, in their actual habitat? I’m not talking about on social media. I’m talking about at four o’clock in the morning, when their baby has chicken pox and is projectile-vomiting up the Orla Kiely stem-print curtains.
The perfect parent isn’t real. It’s a fiction that just does not bear scrutiny. It’s like the Loch Ness monster: even if you think you see one from a distance, you get up close, and it’s just a pair of old tires and a shopping cart.
The problem with this fake ideal is that it is far from harmless. In fact, it’s poison. There is an entire industry of lifestyle philosophies and celebrity-fueled culture built around this myth. And it really is the worst kind of myth. The perfect parent is an insidious, fictional bogeyman, an imaginary monster designed to scare parents into thinking they’re fucking everything up. That they’re not good enough. That they are inadequate. That there is an ideal out there somewhere that they just do not measure up to.
I don’t feel like this. I mean, I feel inadequate, but I don’t feel bad about it. The baseline of expectation for dads really is so much lower than it is for moms. There is considerably less pressure to be an über-parent when you happen to have a penis. No one expects men to bake, in kitten heels, while teaching a baby “phonics.” Men get credit for just generally being around and quietly high-five themselves for being the kind of guy who changes a diaper. (Yes, it’s 2018; yes, it’s ridiculous; yes, it’s true.)
But Lyns, and every other mom I have ever spoken to, has felt this specter of inadequacy at some point, and felt it keenly. A sense that they are failing their little one, or that they should be finding the whole thing . . . easier. And it’s nonsense. A nonsense that can all be traced back to this high ideal of the perfect parent. A bullshit fantasy.
I have no idea what the answer is—how not to fall for this particular lie. I suppose the only thing parents can do is to try not to measure themselves against anything other than the happiness of their own family. If it’s a celebrity mom you imagine when you conjure the image of the perfect parent, imagine too the area outside the flimsy set and the entourage of nannies and makeup artists required to make a celebrity mom look as if parenting is a breeze.
And those noncelebrity “friends” and acquaintances who perpetuate the myth with the smoke and mirrors of their own closely cropped photos? Try not to judge them too harshly. As annoying as they may be, they deserve your pity. Maintaining an illusion like this is tough, and they are lost in the myth themselves.
Matt Coyne is a 40-something year old father and graphic designer from Sheffield, England. One evening, while his three-month-old son Charlie briefly slept, Matt staggered to his desk, opened his laptop, and wrote a side-splittingly funny Facebook post about early fatherhood: Comparing his diaper-changing skills to that of a Formula One pit crew, birth to a Saw movie, and the sound of a baby crying at 3am to “having the inside of your skill sandpapered by an angry Viking,” he shared his observations with friends and family—and soon, to his surprise, the world. In the spirit of that post, which became an instant sensation, Man vs. Baby is the tale of one man’s journey through the first year of parenthood, told with wit, humor, and heart.
Visit http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Man-vs-Baby/Matt-Coyne/9781501187414.
